#697 Unheard Reading

Who says jocks are dumb? These days they probably read more than a texting teenager with an emoticon generator.
Where? you say.
Bookstores are hurting. Magazines are all pictures. Newspapers are nearly defunct. Its TV, satellite, and cable TV everywhere you look. Bigscreens at the supermarket, bigscreens in the bars, even bigscreens in the churches, for gosh sake.
Ah, well, you answered your own question Kwai Chang, it’s all the reading on the TV. I challenge you to turn on a news-o-tainment show and not see script scrolling and scrawling across the bottom of the screen.
“The crawl,” they call it. Sometimes there are even two or three of them. Stock tickers, sports scores, and a continuous update on breaking news. All of this independent of the flashing, word dense graphics on the rest of the screen. Watching a news-o-tainment show requires more fractured attention span than an air traffic controller.
Or the hunter-killer mind that thrives on sports. Opponents coming at you from all sides, finding a path through the defenders, catching a ball, scoring the goal.
It ain’t all just brute strength or the ability to stand in the outfield for hours on end.
And bar and health club TVs hardly ever have the sound on. Instead they employ the hearing-impaired function that puts even more words on the screen and allows a viewer to read the sentences being mouthed silently from the announcers’ or soap operators’ lips.
It first occurred to me when I walked into my club and saw a bunch of people lined up on treadmills, trudging along, all of them with their lips moving.
Ah, I thought, walking and aerobic muttering. There’s a sure calorie burner. Then I turned around and saw they were reading the day’s news, their lips slightly out of sync with the lips of the commentator on the tube. Like a bad Japanese movie.
The most popular programs seem to be sports wrap-up shows. With snarky commentators dishing on the latest games and steroid-scandaled players.
So reading isn’t dead, it just not exactly deep.
Maybe they should do a show on sports in literature. I think somewhere in War and Peace, Tolstoy mentioned hockey.
America, ya gotta love it.